In the 1944 film Gaslight, the filmmaker's intent was to convince the viewer that Paula was going insane. When her husband would go out in the evening, she would notice strange happenings in the house, such as the gaslights going down and then coming back up, and she heard noises on the floor above, which had been sealed up. She would lose things and become confused about what had really happened. Although the viewer finds out at the end that Paula was sane, he is taken in by these situations just as Paula is and led to believe that he is watching her go mad.
The film's principal theme is greed, notably the greed of Anton for Alice's rare and valuable jewels. It drives him to do everything that he does, and at the end he acknowledges that he does not really know why. He tells Paula at the end, "I don't ask you to understand me. Between us all the time were those jewels, like a fire-a fire in my brain that separated us-those jewels which I wanted all my life. I don't know why" (Cukor, 1944). The film's director, George Cukor, stated in an interview that actor Charles Boyer, who played Anton, "had a kind of line, a manner of implacable coldness, and he kept that up all the time" (Higham & Greenbeurg, 1969, p. 57). This characterization lent verisimilitude to Anton's dehumanizing treatment of Paula.
The story also has two subthemes-deception and rescue. Anton's mode of obtaining the jewels he is so greedy for is by deceiving Paula into thinking that she is going mad. He had looked in vain for the jewels and wants her out of the way so that he can look for them more openly, so he is trying to establish her insanity in her own mind and in those of people that see her so that he can have her committed. However, from the beginning of the story, Brian Cameron has been watchful of Paula and curious about solving her aunt's murder. Throughout the film, we see Cameron working to fig
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